A BARELY PERCEPTIBLE WHIFF OF CONTEMPT laces Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection. This slim, elegant novel was originally published in Italian as Le Perfezioni in 2022—Sophie Hughes’s sleek English translation was released by New York Review Books earlier this year. As the story unfolds the reader at first suspects and then finally finds herself praying that Latronico does not like his protagonists, Anna and Tom. Anna and Tom are human beings in the way the plants that accent their sparse Berlin apartment are living vegetation: undeniably but almost incidentally vital, uprooted, replaceable. They do not need to be here. “Here” is a liminal space.
Perhaps you have heard of Annas and Toms, perhaps you have even discussed what they represent often enough that you already have a name for their typology. Annas and Toms live in Berlin because that is where you go when you would rather not be from anywhere. Berlin is an abdication, it is an escape from the terrible period of human history through which anyone reading this review is being forced to live. If you are reading this review, then more than likely you care deeply about a plot of earth on the planet that is currently beset by political and social turmoil. More than likely you have lost sleep over something as significant and idiotic as politics. You are anxious and upset about at least one election. You worry about the safety and trajectory of your country. You give a damn. Did you know, reader, that it is possible to slough off all these awful worries like an irritating skin? Simply move to Berlin. Lithe and slender as Latronico’s novel, you too can troop off to the land of deracination like all Annas and Toms have chosen to do.
The pair, we are told, are in love. We had to be told because there is absolutely no heat of any kind in the book—even the sunlight that “floods the room from the bay window, reflects off the wide, honey-colored floorboards, and casts an emerald glow over the perforate leaves of a monstera shaped like a cloud” conjures the sunlight that floods the rooms in carefully curated Airbnb photographs. Photos are an important part of Anna and Tom’s life, and are important tools that they use to sometimes communicate but more often falsify their own happiness. Anna and Tom are not happy. We know this before they do.
Anna and Tom’s unhappiness is made clear to them through tragedy—somebody else’s, obviously. (It is unlikely that they care enough about anything in particular to be ravaged by calamity.) The Syrian refugee crisis rocks their crisp, clean world. It’s not that Annas and Toms didn’t know about global crises before—they did, they just had no connection to them.
Anna and Tom of Perfection knew that
the migrant pushback policies were inhumane, on a par with the atrocities seen on a daily basis along the US-Mexico border. They condemned both, and felt equally compelled to recognize their privilege and to share the public condemnations that would pop up on their timelines. All their friends felt the same way. Anna and Tom had added a sea rescue organization to their list of monthly donations and signed petitions calling for Europe to do more. Over time, the image of migrants crammed into dinghies beside gray military patrol boats became a staple of their information landscape, their eyes processing them in the same way they did the dusty yellow photos of wars in the Middle East, or the red and cobalt blue of the smoke grenades at G8 protests.
All that changed with the photograph of the drowned boy.
The image of two-year-old Alan Kurdi flooded social media across the globe in September 2015. It forced the world to pay fleeting but significant attention to the atrocities being committed by Bashar al-Assad against his own people in Syria, and it forced Germany to open its borders to them. By the time the Sophie Hughes translation appeared, Assad had finally been forced from power and a large community of Syrian refugees who had joined the Annas and Toms in deracination land were at last able to return home. But almost a decade earlier, their longing for home, and the abject poverty, pain, and cruelty to which the huddled masses testified, rattled Anna and Tom. They and their friends leaped into action volunteering on behalf of the refugees, but “Anna and Tom found it increasingly hard to feel useful.”
They put themselves down for kitchen shifts, where they would spend four hours a week serving bowls of soup. They would get home with headaches and chapped lips from the wind and post a photo of the lunch queue, or call for more volunteers. Warming their hands on a hot mug of genmaicha, they would watch the likes and shares go up and still feel sure they were doing the right thing.
In the end the refugee crisis forced them to recognize a lack in themselves. And perhaps that lack was felt by the Anna and Tom community, because people started getting married, having children, and moving away. Anna and Tom realized that rootlessness does not sit still. The Berlin of the 2000s had a particular culture and offered a particular kind of freedom that expired sooner than Anna and Tom expected. It was as subject to decay as the nondescript European cities from which Anna and Tom fled armed with only their laptops and serviceable English and German.
Anna and Tom are “creative professionals, a term even they found vague and jarring.” Their job is an essential element of their story since it is what facilitates their rootlessness. Like all their friends, the titles of their jobs “were always in English, even in their native language: web developer, graphic designer, online brand strategist.” And like their jobs, the English language is an essential element of Anna and Tom’s arsenal since it facilitates their statelessness, too.
Their mobility allows Anna and Tom to leave Berlin in search of—what? Fulfillment? Connection? The resuscitation of the exciting apathy that had fueled their early days in Berlin? Whatever it is, they spend some amount of time in Lisbon and Sicily failing to find it.
Fittingly, I happened to read the English translation of Perfection twice, on both legs of a journey across the Atlantic. The airport English that surrounded me was the vernacular of the novel. In an essential sense Sophie Hughes translated it into its original language. I wondered several times while reading it whether the Italian could possibly be as crisp, clinical, and sterile as the version I was holding. I wondered this while glancing up at a poster in Ben Gurion Airport that read “Bruchim Habaaim” and then beneath that “Welcome.” As I read the two phrases, I felt my brain lurch from the realm in which I recognize that “Bruchim” is a cognate of the Hebrew word for “blessing,” which connotes a divine presence and a human relationship to it, and then to the realm in which the sterility of the English translation is firm and familiar. Is it possible to translate oneself out of context? Ask Anna and Tom. Or ask Latronico. The end of Perfection hectors that such translation is impossible.
I spent 140 pages with Anna and Tom, and I did that twice. Both times I learned very little about them. They slipped off me, and I didn’t wonder about them. I did wonder about Vincenzo Latronico. I wondered how someone with such an uncanny understanding of what people long for could write a novel that reveals this understanding only in the negative. I looked around the airport waiting room and wondered what it would be like to look with Latronico’s eyes, and to notice what he must notice about people in similar spaces around the world. I wondered how someone so manifestly soulful could know all he knows about the anemic soullessness of the Annas and Toms. Latronico credits Georges Perec’s novel Things for inspiring Perfection, but the author I’d seat him beside at the dinner party of my own mind is Bertolt Brecht, who is remembered for something called “the alienation effect,” which he utilized to create characters that readers could not relate to. Thus, he said, “acceptance or rejection of their actions and utterances [must] take place on a conscious plane instead of, as hitherto, in the audience’s subconscious.” Anna and Tom are not fully drawn people, and the little sense we have of them is not admirable or interesting. But they aren’t supposed to be likable. Anna and Tom are Latronico’s chosen tool for exploring a state of being. They force us to grapple with our own relationship with our origins, our loyalties, our apathies—and that is what he intended.
The only page of Latronico’s novel that vibrates with human presence is the acknowledgments, which bear the oily fingerprints of a thoughtful man. Several times over the course of both readings I flipped to the final page and slurped them up, thirsty for a hit of human feeling:
This novel came about as a tribute to things: A Story of the Sixties, by Georges Perec; anything good in it owes a lot to him. I was able to start it thanks to the hospitality of the Santa Maddalena Foundation, in Donnini, and I finished it with the help of a grant for writers from the Berlin Senate.
Though the book is very short, the list of those who helped bring it into existence—with their care, their patience, and their work—is long. I am grateful to Natalia Latronico, always. . . . And to Sophie Hughes who wrote this book as much as I did.
Latronico needed other people to write his book, and his gratitude to the ones who met that need is salvifically imperfect. It is the only thing in the novel that smacks of fallibility. Perfection is inhuman; it does not sweat or bleed or weep. It cannot fall in love or have its heart broken. Perfection communicates with great sophistication and control so much about the cosmopolitan, rootless Annas and Toms but also about the ones who watch them and wonder what their lives must be like. We live in this world with such neon, inflamed horror. It was fascinating to enter into Anna and Tom’s version of it. I wouldn’t call my stay there a relief, but I would call it perfect—a hit of apathy, a fleeting, clean abdication. For the length of the novel, the horrors taking place in and around the airports through which I stumbled faded to a hum. And when I closed the book and the roars returned to full volume the cacophonies had a fresh significance.
Celeste Marcus is the managing editor of Liberties journal and the author of a biography of Chaim Soutine that will be published by PublicAffairs in October of this year.